So What Was the Fuss All About?

By

James Gardner

Updated Dec. 17, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Through an odd fortuity, the Brooklyn Museum has mounted "James Tissot: 'The Life of Christ'" at the same time as Robert Crumb's illustrations to the Book of Genesis have arrived in bookshops across the nation. Nearly one and a quarter centuries separate the two artists, yet both undertook the extraordinary labor of illustrating their chosen biblical texts with several hundred painstakingly rendered images.

James Tissot: 'The Life of Christ'

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Through Jan. 17

There, however, the comparison ends. Mr. Crumb, best known for inventing such countercultural icons as Mr. Natural, has translated the first book of the Bible into the thickly inked language of his underground comics. He manages to rise to irreligion only in his depictions of Lot and his daughters—or, rather, they would be irreligious were it not for the fact that Mr. Crumb has accurately rendered the text. A few fundamentalists, it is true, have taken the bait, but the great majority of Americans have greeted his illustrations with that tepid respect they reserve for cultural artifacts that don't really concern them directly.

Nothing reveals the drastic shift in societal consensus more than our collective indifference to Mr. Crumb or an earlier generation's excitement and disquiet before the biblical watercolors of James Tissot, all 350 of which were purchased en masse by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900 and are now on view in their galleries. To see his largely sober, realist works today, one would be hard put to imagine why anyone was ever offended. And it is true that many of Tissot's contemporaries, among them Zola, the Brothers Goncourt and Manet, viewed them as worthy examples of religious art. But many contemporaries professed to be scandalized by them, especially by their recounting the life of Christ in the language of realism.

Until he completed this project, Tissot (1836-1902), a native of Nantes in Brittany, was known primarily for his candy-box depictions of contemporary high society on the Continent and in England. But then, to the surprise of all his friends, he suddenly found religion in his late 40s and decided to tell the story of Christ's passion in 350 illustrations. He conceived them not only in the realist style, but in the Orientalist idiom of Gérôme and Fromentin. The art of all three men is characterized by a militant positivism, a determination to describe the exotic East, and everything else, "as it really was." But although many of Tissot's contemporaries were realists and many more treated biblical subjects, none of them had merged the two strains of contemporary culture as aggressively as Tissot did in these watercolors.

The guiding intellectual force behind the images was Ernest Renan, whose "Vie de Jésus" (1863), one of the most influential books of the 19th century, undertook to track down "the historical Jesus." Renan wrote of him as though he were a historical figure no different from Isaac Newton or Louis XIV. The point of the book, and of Tissot's watercolors, was not to diminish Christ, as critics of both men alleged, but rather to make him acceptable to that part of contemporary culture that could no longer accept Christ through the gauze of scriptural authority, that had to see him face to face.

In preparing for this great task, Tissot seemed like an athlete training for a marathon. He studied Scripture and read all the most recent historians on the subject. He even traveled extensively in the Holy Land (dressed at times like a native) and interviewed rabbis and Bedouins in order to understand Christ in the plentitude of his reality. We see, in the 350 paintings, all the favorite subjects of Western art over the previous 15 centuries: the Annunciation, Christ in the Garden, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, largely depicted in the visual language of downtown Jerusalem in the late 19th century.

Given all the effort, one would like to respond more positively to the results. But it is difficult to dispel the feeling that something about Tissot's "Life of Christ" was very wrong from the start. You could begin with the medium itself: Whereas oil-painting is the medium of minute detail, watercolors lend themselves to a charming allusiveness and indeterminacy. Tissot seems hell-bent on extorting from this fragile medium a precision of detail it cannot render, or render well.

The result, all too often, is a brittle and unlovely pedantry that is especially disappointing when we see in the flesh, at the Brooklyn Museum, what were originally intended as mass-produced illustrations. And precisely because these generally diminutive works are illustrations aspiring to the status of autonomous paintings, there is something disappointing in their often inattentive and unimaginative compositions—very different from the lilting, waltzing swerves of Tissot's earlier and far more worldly depictions of the Parisian beau monde. All the magic and mysticism have been chased away, and in their place is a sunlit Jerusalem as prosaic as midtown Manhattan at rush hour.

Finally, an ineffaceable and unappealing odor of marketing hovers over these 350 watercolors. Starting in the 1890s, Tissot took them on tour around the continent and even in North America, where the locals each paid 25 cents for a peek at them. A costly book, reproducing all of the images together with the relevant text and learned commentary, promptly appeared in French and in English.

But the greatest coup of all was the sale of the entire series to the then-nascent Brooklyn Museum for the princely sum of $60,000, at the energetic instigation of John Singer Sargent. When the works went on view, they put the institution squarely on the cultural map. Hundreds of people attended each day, and one clergyman, the Rev. Lyman Abbott, said that "to look upon these pictures . . . is to come as near to living the Christ's life as is permitted to any one living in this modern world."

But the delight in these works proved to very short-lived. Soon after their purchase, they were dispatched to the vaults of the museum, where they were to remain, largely unseen, for most of the next century. And now they emerge into a vastly different world from the one they last inhabited. Some dazzle of virtuosity remains, but their principal charm consists in embodying a period style that vanished long ago.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.